Promotional support is brought to you by the Power of Narrative Conference, celebrating its 26th year on the last weekend of March 28 and 29. 300-400 journalists from around the world are coming. Keynote speakers Susan Orlean, Connie Schultz, and Dan Zak will deliver the knowledge. Listeners of this podcast can get 15% off your enrollment fee by using the code CNF15. To learn more visit combeyond.bu.edu … and use that CNF15 code.
By Brendan O’Meara
When Andrew Dubbins locks into a story idea, it’s got to tick (tic?) certain boxes. Above them all is it’s got to have a story engine, it’s got to be cinematic.
And so it is with his story for The Atavist Magazine, “The After Dark Bandit.” This is a wild story about twin brothers who robbed banks at the same time, thus confounding authorities about how, it would appear, one guy was knocking off two banks at the same time.
Andrew is the author of Into Enemy Waters: The Story of the WWII Frogmen Who became the Navy SEALs. He was journalist of the year by the LA Press Club in 2020, and his work has appeared in Men’s Health, Slate, the LA Times, Smithsonian, Alta, and The Daily Beast.
In this conversation we talk about the story engine, how he bankrolls certain gigs out of pocket and how he makes that happen, and how his passion for good stories drives him and his work. Great stuff.
Parting Shot: On Lessons from “Sideways”
Melanie and I have a stack of old DVDs we’re looking to donate or keep. It’s about 40 deep. Just old shit. To take the decision out of it, we piled them up and we’re going top down. Sideways, starring Paul Giamatti and Thomas Haden Church, is a buddy movie. Didn’t age well. Most things from the aughts, I’m finding, have not aged well. Except Napoleon Dynamite. Giamatti’s character, Miles, is an alcoholic middle school English teacher who has written a near-1,000-page novel that no one will publish. At one point he’s asked what the novel is about, and he can’t explain it, changes genres, it’s a disaster. Finally, when he hears from his agent, she says, and I’m paraphrasing, publishers just didn’t know how to market it. Three years of writing the book, poof.
The lesson, one, don’t then pop a bunch of Xanex and chug a bunch of wine, but two, as much as it might make your artist heart squirm, you have to consider how your idea will sell. What does it look like as a product slotted alongside other titles. You have to imagine making the sales pitch to investors who aren’t so concerned about the art but rather making money. You have to code switch in that regard.
So, like Steven Hyden said on the pod, you have to select a subject that has a certain measure of baked-in audience. Steven wrote about Bruce Springsteen and Pearl Jam, not Pavement and Mudhoney. There are scores of brilliant athletes, but if you’re gonna write a golf biography you’re better of finding an angle on Tiger Woods vs. say Fred Couples or Jordan Spieth.
We might be grossed out by that, but if you have skills as a storyteller, researcher, reporter, a writer, you’re going to have to “sell out” a bit. I love when big actors make their scratch in franchise movies so they can act on Broadway, or small indie movies.
Now, if you have a steady gig as a professor and you love writing weird essays on esoteric topics and you can land a deal with a smaller press, great, then you might not have to be thinking in terms of commercial success, or commercial optics. Just because a book is about a famous person doesn’t mean it’ll be a best seller, but it gives you a better shot. It’s why my baseball memoir is in the drawer. Memoirs are a tough sell and frankly I’d rather keep building my authority with the podcast and maybe if a biography or two or three works out, the memoir will be more enticing.
What we find is that people who fail to think in terms of how it will look as a product, as a commodity, as something that costs a lot of money to make and something that will hopefully make some dough, they get bitter and burned out, resentful.
Still, there’s no guarantee that it’ll workout. How many people tried writing vampire stories after Twilight? Or horse racing after Seabiscuit? So, I’m not saying chase a trend, but there are certain signifiers that make people’s heads tilt a little bit.
The lesson? Be able to sum up the premise of your book in less than 20 seconds. Be thinking about how it will be marketed, and it might just grease the skids.
